Towards Tactile Communication of English Language: A Visual Handbook Enhances Letter Learning

Abstract

The haptic communication of languages by engaging wearable displays has recently attracted much attention because of the continuous technological improvements (e.g., miniaturized hardware, and software). Currently, one of the primary research goals towards the haptic communication of language is to develop training protocols that reduce the time of learning by making the learning experience less cumbersome. This study provides a novel training protocol by separating learning into two sections, that is, offline, and online training. During offline training, the technique is based on visual learning, i.e., the spatial-temporal information of the haptic patterns is obtained by sight without stimulating the skin. During online training, the technique is based on kinesthetic learning, i.e., the knowledge of the patterns is obtained by hands-on experience. The learning of English letters is used to illustrate the proposed technique. The results show that the proposed two-section protocol lowers the time of online learning in the state-of-the-art methods.